Votes for Women!

Friday is Women's Equality Day, and given Hillary's nomination, now seems about as good a time as any to see some images from the women's suffrage movement. 

"The greatest thrills of the campaign came with the street parades.... I marched in one in Baltimore and in the famous one staged in Washington the day before the first inauguration of President Wilson.... The professional women in cap and gown, lawyers, doctors, teachers and students formed a conspicous section of the parade." - Dr. Lillian Welsh, Reminiscences of Thirty Years in Baltimore

Photograph courtesy of the Goucher College Special Collections.

Photograph courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.

      Dr. Lillian Welsh was nothing if not a champion for equal rights. She was born in 1858 and dedicated her life to the education of women. She studied medicine in Zurich, Switzerland before any U.S. medical schools allowed women and taught physiology and physical education at the Women's College of Baltimore, which today is Goucher College. Welsh and her partner Mary Sherwood (they basically lived together as lesbians, although sometimes politely were referred to as spinsters) also worked to provide medical care for poor women in Baltimore City at the turn of the century. ​

     Miss Elizabeth Garrett was another prominent Baltimore women's equality activist. Her father was John Work Garrett, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and when he died, she inherited what would be worth over 53 million dollars today. She gave some of that money to found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, with the stipulation that women would be allowed to study there (something still pretty rare in the late 1800s). 
     In 1906, the National American Women Suffrage Association held their convention in Baltimore, and Garrett invited prominent pro-suffrage Baltimoreans to her home to meet with leaders of the movement Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe, and Anna Howard Shaw. That was Anothony's last convention; she died just a month later in March, 1906. 

Courtesy Enoch Pratt Free Library

Courtesty Enoch Pratt Free Library

     Women would never have gained the right to vote without men who believed in equal rights, like Judge Jacob M. Moses. A Baltimore native and graduate of Johns Hopkins, Moses practiced law in Baltimore, was a Maryland Senator from 1900-1904, and then served as the first Judge of the Juvenile Court in Maryland from 1908-1910. His social-mindedness extended from being president of the Maccabean Social Settlement of Baltimore and a member of the Board of Federated Jewish Charities of Baltimore, to being an advocate for women's rights. 

"I believe that men and women should be equal in every respect before the law."
​- Judge Jacob M. Moses

    As a Senator, Moses introduced a bill so that women in Maryland could be admitted to the bar. Interestingly, that debate started with Etta Maddox, the first woman to graduate from the Baltimore Law School, who was sister of Emma Maddox Funck, the "Mrs. William Funck" listed in the invitation from Ms. Garrett above. Baltimore was a small city, and Moses knew these women and supported them. Moses corresponded with the National Women's Party about the legal position of women in Maryland (the document to the right), and was a member of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, a pretty self-explanatory organization that was important in the suffrage movement. 

It's been a long road from Seneca Falls in 1848 to today, and hopefully we'll see more people working together for equity in the future.
​
​P.S. If you haven't seen The Suffragette yet, watch it.